"Fernando," who was detained by federal immigration agents on suspicion of being in the country illegally, is seen in his Northern Virginia home Sunday, Nov. 18, 2018. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained Fernando after targeting someone he was with. He spent time in the Norfolk City Jail, which has a contract to house ICE detainees.

"Fernando," who was detained by federal immigration agents on suspicion of being in the country illegally, is seen in his Northern Virginia home Sunday, Nov. 18, 2018. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained Fernando after targeting someone he was with. He spent time in the Norfolk City Jail, which has a contract to house ICE detainees.

"Fernando," who was detained by federal immigration agents on suspicion of being in the country illegally, is seen in his Northern Virginia home Sunday, Nov. 18, 2018. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained Fernando after targeting someone he was with. He spent time in the Norfolk City Jail, which has a contract to house ICE detainees.

Norfolk sheriff has quietly held hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants in city jail

"Fernando," who was detained by federal immigration agents on suspicion of being in the country illegally, is seen in his Northern Virginia home Sunday, Nov. 18, 2018. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained Fernando after targeting someone he was with. He spent time in the Norfolk City Jail, which has a contract to house ICE detainees.

Cal Cary/For The Virginian-Pilot/For The Virginian-Pilot

"Fernando," who was detained by federal immigration agents on suspicion of being in the country illegally, is seen in his Northern Virginia home Sunday, Nov. 18, 2018. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained Fernando after targeting someone he was with. He spent time in the Norfolk City Jail, which has a contract to house ICE detainees.

NORFOLK

With a firestorm over illegal immigration raging across the country, the Norfolk sheriff has been quietly working with federal authorities for more than a year to lock up hundreds of suspected illegal immigrants in the city jail.

Since September 2017, Sheriff Joe Baron has held more than 850 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, all while the embattled federal agency fought blowback and withstood calls from high-level officials for it to be abolished.

The cooperation came as a surprise to other elected officials in Norfolk. Baron is a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic city that, in the 2016 presidential election, voted 68 percent for Hillary Clinton and 26 percent for Donald Trump. Moreover, the sheriff signed on to help the agency as local leaders across the country, who’d agreed to assist immigration officers in years past, were ending that relationship, uncomfortable with the Trump administration’s iteration of ICE.

And even as Baron works with ICE, Norfolk's police chief, Larry Boone, has tried to establish trust with immigrants so they'll be comfortable reporting crimes. Boone has held community meetings, where he tells Latino residents through an interpreter that Norfolk police don't care about their immigration status.

Housing ICE detainees — or “rotating bodies,” as one ICE officer put it — protects Norfolk residents from “some bad characters,” Baron said. It also brings in cash. ICE has paid nearly $382,000 to house detainees in the Norfolk jail, although state officials siphon off most of that.

Immigration advocates say teaming up with ICE lets the "rogue” federal agency break up families and hunt down hard-working residents, some of whom have committed no crime and are seeking safety from their war-torn home countries.

ICE couldn’t have rounded up more than 130 people in Northern Virginia, Charlottesville, Henrico and elsewhere during July’s “Operation Eagle Shield” if they hadn’t had the Norfolk jail as a place to put them, said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, legal director for the nonprofit Legal Aid Justice Center’s immigrant advocacy program.

“Norfolk right now is a key player in ICE’s civil immigration enforcement, and working truly hand in glove with an agency that … has been going off the rails,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.

ICE officers are just doing their job by enforcing the nation’s immigration laws enacted by Congress, said Russ Hott, director of the agency’s enforcement and removal operations for the Washington D.C. field office, which includes Virginia.

“It’s dangerous and reckless to vilify the law enforcement officers who carry out that mission when the disdain is with the laws themselves,” Hott said. “We’re apolitical and non-partisan. We carry out what we’ve been tasked to do.”

Last year, he said, about 93 percent of the people ICE officers detained in Virginia and D.C. were convicted criminals or had charges pending. ICE spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell said that figure applies to all charges, regardless of severity or when they happened.

Baron said jailing ICE detainees is legal and compared it to locking up inmates for other federal agencies, like the U.S. Marshals and Federal Bureau of Investigation, something Norfolk’s been doing for 20 years. But unlike those inmates, ICE detainees in the jail are not charged with crimes. They are being held on suspicion of civil immigration violations.

And until a recent change prompted by The Virginian-Pilot’s inquiries, most or all of the ICE detainees held at the Norfolk jail had not had a hearing before a judge.

Baron dismissed the charge that he’s complicit with what ICE and other immigration enforcement agencies are doing nationally, like splitting up parents and their children under the so-called “family separation” policy.

“I’m concerned not about whether … detaining people down at the border is right or not, because that’s a national conversation. I’m looking at things locally,” he said. “I’m not concerned about the political thing. I’m concerned about keeping our community safe.”

Other local governments across the country are doing the opposite. Uneasy with the Trump administration’s immigration policies, they’re axing lucrative contracts with federal immigration authorities, according to a June 28 report in The New York Times.

Leaders in California, Oregon and Northern Virginia cities and towns decided in the last two years to kill ICE contracts similar to the one the Norfolk Sheriff’s Office.

“It just felt inherently unjust for Sacramento to make money from dealing with ICE,” Sacramento County Supervisor Phil Serna told The Times. “For me, it came down to an administration that is extremely hostile to immigrants. I didn’t feel we should be a part of that.”

A deal and a misunderstanding

The Norfolk City Jail.

Google Maps

Under the agreement Baron signed, detainees are supposed to spend, at most, three days in the Norfolk jail before ICE officers transfer them to one of their long-term facilities, usually their 851-bed detention center in Farmville, some 60 miles west of Richmond.

With the ICE contract, which is actually an add-on to a 20-year-old contract the sheriff’s office has with the U.S. Marshals to house their federal inmates, the Norfolk jail became part of a small network of detention facilities dotted across the state. They hold ICE detainees, usually for a few days, before they’re sent to a long-term facility.

There are at least three of those in the state: the Virginia Peninsula Regional Jail in Williamsburg; a detention center near Bowling Green in Caroline County, about 50 miles north of Richmond; and ICE’s privately-run, exclusive detention center in Farmville.

Nearly 19,000 detainees have been arrested in Virginia and D.C. over the last five years, according to ICE data.

Farmville is one of 32 facilities across the country dedicated to holding ICE detainees. ICE also has deals with 189 other “non-dedicated” facilities, like the Norfolk jail and Virginia Peninsula, to house detainees.

In 2017, ICE officials asked Baron whether he’d be willing to house their detainees in the city jail, Cutrell said in an email.

Baron and his top deputy met with an ICE official in April of that year, and the Norfolk jail started housing detainees that September, according to Sheriff’s Office emails obtained by The Virginian-Pilot through a public-records request.

Since then, ICE has pumped hundreds of detainees through the jail before deporting them, or taking them to long-term facilities as the detainees await the outcome of their immigration cases.

From January to June, Norfolk held from 10 to several dozen detainees in the jail at a time. But in July, the number spiked to nearly 200. In August, it topped 300. September: 261.

Cutrell, the ICE spokeswoman, said the influx was because of a chicken pox outbreak at Farmville.

But ICE emails and an internal memo from June, which were obtained by The Pilot, make no mention of chicken pox; instead, they give other reasons for the jump in detainees.

On June 19, the day before President Trump signed an executive order to stop separating parents from their children when entering the country, ICE officer David Gritte sent an email to Baron’s second in command, Michael O’Toole: ICE was planning a large-scale roundup in early- to mid-July and wanted to bring 75-100 “aliens” to the jail for up to three days.

“We are good,” O’Toole replied the next day. “No problem. We have available beds.”

A week later, Hott wrote a memo, asking his boss for permission to keep detainees at the Norfolk jail more than the usual 72 hours.

ICE had a nationwide shortage of beds because it was apprehending more people at the border and funnelling some into Virginia and D.C., Hott wrote. Plus, in mid-July, officers were planning a roundup of 200 people suspected of being in the country illegally.

Hott’s request was approved, and Baron agreed to relax the 72-hour limit for three months.

The next day — June 28 — an ICE official wrote to O’Toole, thanking the Sheriff’s Office for its “unwavering support” and saying it would take about a week for the influx of detainees to reach Norfolk.

That happened faster than expected, leading ICE to apologize. But in an email, O’Toole wrote that it was no problem, as long as the jail got a day or two heads up if 20 or more detainees were brought in.

At the end of September, the 72-hour limit kicked back in and the number of detainees flowing to the Norfolk jail returned to less than 100 a month.

But there’d been a problem from the beginning: ICE was housing detainees at the Norfolk jail that Baron thought he’d specifically barred them from bringing.

In a December interview, Baron said he made a verbal agreement with ICE officials: They would only bring over detainees who’d been before a federal immigration judge and been either denied a bond or ordered to leave the country.

But that’s not what happened. In December, ICE confirmed to The Pilot that many, if not all, of the detainees that have been housed in the Norfolk jail have not been before a judge at all.

“That’s not how the process works,” Hott said when told of Baron’s understanding.

Unlike law-enforcement officers arresting criminal defendants, ICE officers have the power to jail suspected illegal immigrants without any court approval. The first time such detainees see judges is if they ask for bond hearings — something ICE says can take weeks.

Hott said in December that he was not aware of any verbal agreement with the sheriff’s office.

But after that interview, ICE officials reached out to the sheriff’s office to “clarify” their agreement, Cutrell said earlier this month in an email. Since then, ICE has only brought detainees that a judge has ordered to be deported, and will continue that practice for the foreseeable future.

So for more than a year, seemingly unbeknownst to Baron, ICE cycled certain people through his jail after he forbid them from doing so.

“Not our job”

From the beginning, ICE officials have tried to get the Norfolk sheriff to do more.

At the initial April 2017 meeting, Gritte, the Norfolk-based ICE officer in charge of finding and deporting those here illegally, tried to sell Baron on ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes and trains local police or sheriff’s deputies to enforce federal immigration laws.

Seventy-eight agencies in 20 states are part of 287(g), including two in Virginia: Culpeper County Sheriff’s Office and Prince William-Manassas Regional Adult Detention Center.

Baron declined to participate. He said they approached him again after he was elected in November 2017, thinking he might’ve changed his mind.

In February, ICE officials met with Baron to talk about making the Norfolk jail an “over 72 hour facility” like the Virginia Peninsula Regional Jail. That would transform the jail from a holding facility into a bona fide detention center where ICE could put detainees for months as their immigration cases proceed through federal courts.

Five months into the contract, things had been going well, O’Toole said. ICE wanted to take it to the next level.

But becoming an over 72-hour facility requires a jail undergo more regular inspections, and it would have taken at least a year of work and taxpayer money to meet federal standards. Holding detainees for weeks and months would have added stress on deputies, Baron said.

So, the sheriff said, he listened politely to ICE’s pitch, but said no.

“I’m not interested in my staff becoming quasi-federal agents,” Baron said. “ICE agents can come and do their own job.”

Collateral

"Fernando," who was detained by federal immigration agents on suspicion of being in the country illegally, is seen in his Northern Virginia home Sunday, Nov. 18, 2018. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained Fernando after targeting someone he was with. He spent time in the Norfolk City Jail, which has a contract to house ICE detainees.

Cal Cary/For The Virginian-Pilot/For The Virginian-Pilot

Fernando was one of the 132 people rounded up in ICE’s July raid. After working his shift as a plumber, he’d just gotten to his apartment in Northern Virginia, which he shares with his sister, nieces and his 6-year-old beagle.

The Pilot agreed not to use Fernando’s real name because he fears immigration officials will retaliate against him for talking to the media. Both ICE and the sheriff’s office objected to not knowing Fernando’s identity because it prevented them from verifying or debunking his claims, as well as providing additional information about him.

On a mid-July evening, Fernando was, as usual, unwinding by chatting in the foyer with some of the other guys in the building.

Boom — law enforcement officers swarmed them.

His lawyer thinks ICE officers were homing in on one of the men his client was hanging out with, and Fernando got swept up with him. Under the Obama administration, ICE officers would have plucked their target out of the group and left the others to go about their day, the lawyer said. Under Trump, no one is exempt, which leads to “collateral arrests” of people near ICE’s original targets.

Fernando’s arrest would lead him to a roughly month-long stay in the Norfolk jail, which he described as “hell”, something he wouldn’t wish on anyone.

For the first three or four days, Fernando said, he was mixed in with other jail inmates, defendants charged with crimes.

After that, he and other detainees were separated, since they’re not charged with criminal offenses.

Still, other detainees banged flip flops throughout the night, forcing Fernando to sleep during the day. Fights broke out over using the phone since only two were available for the roughly 70 detainees in Fernando’s section. Complaints and requests went unanswered.

“There was just no order,” Fernando said.

When Fernando arrived, deputies gave him a blanket, jail jumpsuit, as well as pairs of boxers, shorts and socks, he said. In his roughly four weeks at the jail, no one washed the blanket. They changed out the jumpsuit a couple times. No one ever washed his underwear, t-shirt or socks; detainees had to do that themselves, in their sinks.

“That’s not accurate,” Baron said. “We wash clothes all the time. We have a whole room full of washing machines and dryers.”

Sheriff's office spokeswoman Deanna LeBlanc said staff wash underwear, socks and linens once a week and return them to inmates and detainees the same day. She said she checked records for the cell blocs where many detainees were housed in late July, and they show deputies collected clothing items once a week.

Fernando said detainees could take showers daily, but the water was too hot — “like you were trying to make soup or something...cup of noodles,” Fernando said. He complained to deputies about the water temperature several times, but like other complaints he made, he heard nothing back. In fact, he said, the water got hotter.

“But there was just no response,” he said.

About a week before his hearing in federal immigration court, Fernando was transferred to Virginia Peninsula Regional Jail in Williamsburg where he would face a judge in Arlington via video conference.

Guards at Virginia Peninsula were much more disciplined than those in Norfolk, he said. There were fewer of them, but they had more control over their facility.

The difference was clear from the beginning when they showed detainees around before taking them to their cells. Unlike the Norfolk jail, the guards kept detainees from getting too loud and didn’t allow them to insult each other. If a detainee started causing problems, they got sent to isolation.

Moreover, detainees got decent food and medical care, meaning they didn’t have to pay for their prescriptions or go without. There were more phones.

Jail staff provided clothes, and washed them twice a week, Fernando said. They gave them pens and paper to write to family.

In Norfolk, deputies let him outside twice during his month there, he said. It was tough to tell if it was day or night, aside from their daily routine. There was one window in the cell block that the sun shone through. It was maybe two-feet-by-six inches — Fernando held up his hands to show the size of the window.

“If you wanted to see the sunlight … you could crane your head and see if there was light coming through it or not. But other than that, it was just electric light, all day and all night.”

At Virginia Peninsula, detainees could go outside, even play soccer.

“You could feel the air; you could feel heat; you could feel the sunlight — natural light,” Fernando said.

It was still jail, but not the Norfolk jail, and that was a relief.

“You feel like you’ve left hell,” Fernando said.

Fernando’s account doesn’t make sense, Baron said. Neither inmates nor detainees get to go outside at the city jail, because there is no outside. They exercise by going to an indoor gym where inmates can run, play basketball, and play volleyball. In a follow-up email, LeBlanc said inmates and detainees get to use the gym twice each week for an hour at a time.

“I would question whether he was in our facility,” Baron said. “Are you sure he’s talking about the Norfolk City Jail?”

He was. Records confirm Fernando was booked into Norfolk’s jail in mid-July.

After an immigration judge gave him a bond, someone paid the money to free him and he got out of Virginia Peninsula, his lawyer said He went back home to Northern Virginia, and started working again as a plumber while his case moves through the immigration court.

“The greatest threats”

ICE officers don’t detain people willy-nilly, Hott said. Before starting the job, they go through 18 weeks of training, learning about the Immigration and Nationality Act, the federal law governing who can and can’t be in the country.

In early 2017, ICE officials changed the requirement officers needed to detain someone, from reasonable suspicion to the more demanding probable cause standard, Hott said. Moreover, officers don’t go after everyone, but prioritize deporting people who are the biggest threats to national security and public safety.

“We’re holding the greatest risks,” he said.

officers can home in on a suspect through biometric data, like fingerprints, Hott said. They work with counterparts in foreign governments to dig into a suspect’s background, unearthing someone’s date and place of birth, when and how they entered the country, what their parents’ immigration status was when they came to the country.

Then they’ll juxtapose the facts of an investigation with immigration laws to figure out whether they have probable cause to suspect their target is in the country illegally.

“It’s a very complex investigation,” Hott said. “We don’t conduct ‘sweeps’ or ‘raids.’ This connotes that law enforcement is rounding up people indiscriminately.”

That’s exactly what’s happening because sometimes there’s no investigation beforehand, Sandoval-Moshenberg said. He pointed to detainees like Fernando, ones who aren’t targeted in raids, but get scooped up as “collateral arrests.” That undercuts ICE’s claim that they’re judiciously using their prosecutorial discretion to go after the most dangerous people, he said.

When people like Fernando were detained during the Obama administration, ICE officers had the authority to, and would usually give them, an “ICE bond,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. Now that almost never happens, and those detained sit in jail for weeks before they can see a judge.

Cutrell said ICE doesn’t track statistics on how many of those arrested are given a bond.

“They have to be creative”

Jail managers like sheriffs and superintendents have to cobble together their funding, which makes it attractive to house someone else’s inmates for cash, said John Jones, executive director of the Virginia Sheriffs’ Association.

They get most of their money from two sources: the local governments they serve and the state.

But over the past decade, cities and counties in Virginia have been covering an ever-larger share of jail budgets as state support has dwindled and the value of federal contracts — only a sliver to begin with — has shrunk by half.

“It’s a challenge to do what you need to do as a sheriff with the money the state gives you,” Virginia Beach Sheriff Ken Stolle said. “You find yourself in a very hard spot trying to make ends meet.”

So when ICE asked him to start housing detainees a couple years ago, he looked at it as a “business opportunity.”

He did some quick math: Stolle thinks he could house 200 detainees. At $55 a day apiece, that’s $4 million a year, about half of which the state would keep.

That could help pay for programs the jail offers that aren’t covered by the state, Stolle said: GED classes, Bible study, drug and alcohol treatment.

“Two million dollars goes a long way,” he said.

Not long enough.

Stolle said he turned ICE down. Like most jails in the area, he houses federal criminal suspects under a contract with the U.S. Marshal. But Stolle said he didn’t like the idea of housing people who weren’t charged with a crime.

Holding ICE detainees would have forced him to create a dual system, one for inmates and another for detainees, he said. Deputies would have to learn two protocols for dealing with the groups. Inmates might get jealous of detainees’ privileges, potentially leading to fights.

“The juice would not be worth the squeeze,” Stolle said.

“Not fair”

Not everyone gets the same juice, and Norfolk gets the least of all.

The $44.50 a day ICE pays for each detainee falls far short of the $69.48 it costs to house someone in the jail. Most of those costs, like deputies’ pay, are fixed, so the sheriff could still come out ahead by locking up ICE detainees without having to hire any more guards.

But, Baron said, The Pilot’s investigation into the ICE contract led him to discover he’s getting one of the lowest rates — maybe the lowest — in the state. It’s the same price then-Sheriff Bob McCabe negotiated nearly 20 years ago when he first signed a contract with the U.S. Marshals.

“It’s not fair to the City of Norfolk,” Baron said. “That’s probably something we’re going to look at.”

One potential problem: The jail is now grandfathered into the feds' 1999 facility standards for jails. Renegotiating for more money would mean meeting 2019 standards, something O’Toole estimated would take a year and might not be a good idea amid the jail's unrelated multimillion-dollar security overhaul.

Plus, the city only got about $11 of the $44.50 after the state siphoned off the rest, as it does for all federal inmates held at local jails.

So the sheriff’s office housed some 860 detainees for 8,600 days last year. In return, the feds paid $381,810. The state took almost three-quarters of that, leaving the city with $96,219.

"You do have to weigh that and balance that...whether it's really going to help at all," Baron said.

That money will sit in an account until City Council members vote on what to do with it. Baron said that, in the past with U.S. Marshals money, he’s negotiated with city leaders to figure out how to spend it.

In the dark

Nearly none of Norfolk’s leaders knew Baron was contracting with ICE or housing detainees. Not City Council members. Not the police chief. Mayor Kenny Alexander said he didn’t know about it until Hurricane Florence was bearing down on the East Coast in September — a year into the contract — because an immigration advocacy group tried to force Baron to move detainees to another facility by suing him.

Baron said he told City Manager Doug Smith he was housing ICE detainees around the time he started doing so. If so, Smith never relayed that information to his bosses, the City Council, Alexander said on Wednesday.

Smith didn’t return several emails, texts and phone calls over the past two weeks.

As sheriff, Baron is an independent, constitutional officer and wasn’t obligated to consult with or inform the city before signing on with ICE. He said he considered the ICE contract an “operational decision” and so he didn’t give city leaders a heads up.

City Council members Angelia Williams Graves and Paul Riddick said that, while they didn’t know about the contract, they weren’t bothered by being in the dark. In fact, Riddick said he’s glad Baron jumped on the opportunity to reel in federal money before ICE signed with another jail.

“Somebody’s going to get paid,” Riddick said. “Why not us?”

Councilman Tommy Smigiel said he trusts Baron, but he wished the sheriff would have given the council a heads up, especially since it deals with an explosive national issue.

Councilmembers Martin Thomas, Mamie Johnson and Courtney Doyle did not respond to several phone calls, texts, and emails over the past three months.

Since Smigiel was elected in 2010, he said, sheriffs have constantly told City Council members they’re hurting for employees, funding and bed space. So how do they have enough beds to house ICE detainees and enough deputies to watch them?

“Those are questions I’d want to ask,” Smigiel said. “I’d like to hear from Joe.”

Baron told The Pilot he’s got plenty of room, even after he closes down one of eight floors at a time for the multi-million dollar renovation. The city jail is designed to hold 896 inmates. But by triple-bunking and having inmates sleep on floor mats, then-Sheriff Bob McCabe was cramming 1,900 in the jail in 2005 and 1,600 in 2011.

They also have the staff to watch detainees, the sheriff added, even after the state shrunk his force of 360 sworn deputies by 8 percent in 2017 because he was overseeing far fewer inmates — about 1,100.

At the start of an October interview, Alexander said he supported Baron’s decision to house ICE detainees because it was legal.

But later in the interview, Alexander said he’d be more supportive if the sheriff were locking up immigrants accused of committing crimes. The mayor said he wants federal lawmakers to create a pathway to citizenship, even for immigrants who are here illegally. After all, American companies, including those in Norfolk, benefit from their labor.

Local leaders who help the feds are complicit in enforcing their policies, even if they don’t do so directly, he said.

“Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean we want to be a part of it,” Alexander said. “Segregation was legal, and slavery was legal.

“Our City Council needs to be a part of this conversation.”

It eventually was. Sort of.

After The Pilot started contacting council members in November, some called Baron and he called the others preemptively, he said. Baron said they all told him they supported him; the mayor was among them, and didn’t use any rhetoric about slavery or segregation.

“He, in fact, expressed to me that he trusts what I’m doing ... that we’re all part of Team Norfolk,” Baron said.

Two council members had questions, Baron added: Andria McClellan and another he said he couldn’t remember.

Baron said McClellan raised concerns about how ICE and the Trump administration are treating immigrants. The sheriff said he told her he wasn’t interested in the national debate. His job is to run a safe jail and protect the citizens of Norfolk.

McClellan didn’t respond to requests for comment after her conversation with the sheriff.

“We are getting some folks off the streets that shouldn’t be on our streets,” Baron said. “That makes our streets safer.”

None of these conversations happened in public.

Sunshine

Local leaders in communities elsewhere have faced bigger blowback and reacted more swiftly.

An Oct. 1 article in The Washington Post describes activists’ “furious backlash” against ICE while admitting their inability to confront the agency head on.

“They can’t stop deportations, but they hope to throw sand in the gears by targeting pressure points in the system: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement relies on local agencies to jail detainees who may be in the country illegally, notify ICE of their release and even help conduct immigration enforcement,” The Post reported.

Those activists have won battles at the local level, according to the article.

So far, Norfolk City Council members have kept the issue out of the public eye. After saying the council needed to be a part of the conversation, the mayor did nothing to push that discussion into the public sphere.

On Wednesday, Alexander said none of his fellow council members, after learning about the ICE detainees, asked to have a discussion about the issue at a meeting. Instead, they spoke privately with Baron and each other. The consensus among them, the mayor said, was that Baron was elected to run the jail and what he was doing was legal — enough said. "There's been no interest," he said.

But, Alexander added later in Wednesday’s conversation, the city does have a stake in what happens at the jail, which sits a few feet away from City Hall. While Baron and the sheriff’s office operate the jail, the city owns and pays to maintain it.

“We should be briefed on (the ICE issue),” Alexander said, adding that that briefing should be public. “I’m all about transparency, openness and sunshine.”

Still, outside the city’s topmost leaders, few know about ICE’s involvement at the city jail. Sandoval-Moshenberg said people should be aware of what’s happening and suggested they might not be as accepting as the City Council.

“The good citizens of Norfolk might not agree with this as a policy matter – (that) Norfolk should really be taking active steps to facilitate ICE immigration enforcement.”

Correction: March 8, 2019

An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect figure for the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees that were housed in the Norfolk City Jail last year.

The jail has held 860 detainees since its contract with ICE started in October 2017, according to figures provided by the Norfolk Sheriff’s Office.

When asked how many ICE detainees had been admitted into the jail during each month in 2018, the Sheriff’s Office originally responded that the number of “admits” was 1,227, a figure the office confirmed before The Pilot published its story.

A week and a half after the story was published, a sheriff’s office spokeswoman said the number of detainees held was lower. She said the office uses the term “admits” to mean, not the number of people admitted into the jail in a given month, but the number of people held in the jail at any point in a given month. That means detainees who were in the jail on both July 31 and Aug. 1, for example, would be counted as “admits” for both months, so the 1,227 figure included hundreds of inmates who were double counted.

More information

About 40 people went to the City Council meeting Tuesday night to denounce Sheriff Joe Baron for working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They want council members to pressure Baron to stop holding ICE detainees in the city jail.

Followed notifications

Please log in to use this feature

Welcome to the conversation.

We strive to be fair and accurate in our reporting. In turn, we ask
that you remain civil and open-minded in your responses. Comments
should be relevant to the topic at hand, factual and thoughtful.
The comments section is like a letter to the editor, not a chat
room. Please read the full commenting rules before posting.
Read the full rules here.

Watch this discussion.Stop watching this discussion.

(0) comments

Welcome to the discussion.

We strive to be fair and accurate in our reporting. In turn, we ask
that you remain civil and open-minded in your responses. Comments
should be relevant to the topic at hand, factual and thoughtful.
The comments section is like a letter to the editor, not a chat
room. Please read the full commenting rules before posting.